Visual time: the image in history

Abstract

To render time sensible: transmissibilityReview of:Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013, 207 pp., 8 col. plates, 21 b. & w. illus., $89.85 hdbk, $24.95 pbk, Hardback ISBN 978-0-8223-5354-6, Paperback ISBN 978-0-8223-5369-0.Jae EmerlingKeith Moxey's Visual Time: The Image in History imagines itself as an art historical methodology when in fact it only rhetorically questions the discipline's 'epistemology certainty' about images and temporality. Moxey never enacts a methodology capable of confronting the complicated issues of temporality, images, and art historiography. Instead, he traipses through seven chapters on these issues that read more like transcriptions of conference talks than the in-depth work one expects in a book project. While Moxey offers convincing explanations of art historical shortcomings regarding an artwork's essential anachronism-for example, the simple fact that a work from 1907 is encountered anew, time and again, in each present, by new sets of viewers-he fails to arrive at either a method or a theoretical framework to address what he terms the 'anachronic power' of an artwork. Nonetheless, this text astutely surveys much recent work on images and historiography. It does so by addressing pre-existing methodological issues such as linear chronology, ekphrasis, contemporaneity, and aesthetic experience.The problem is that Moxey only flirts with theory in a text purportedly about images and time. This is baffling. How could a book purporting to rethink art history by focusing on the complex temporality enfolded within an aesthetic encounter refrain from fully engaging with Jacques Derrida's late work on photography and temporality, or Gilles Deleuze's quite famous theory of the time-image? I mention these figures not to assert that their work offers the only answers to the issues Moxey foregrounds. Quite the contrary. I mention these figures because Moxey chose to address this topic in a manner that reads like a kind of aristocratic overview, a survey of thought that never quite gets its hands dirty. Rhetorical questions and faint suggestions of a method abound in this text. But in the end, there is nothing like the critical and creative work found in Georges Didi-Huberman's Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (1990, 2005) or T. J. Demos' Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013).1 As Moxey writes of his own approach: 'Instead of offering even tentative answers to these issues confronting the history of art today, these essays ally themselves with persistent questions' (8).I would argue that we are well aware of the questions facing the history of art. The problem is that we persist in the same historiographic mode despite theoretical challenges and the creation of new artworks. What remains to be done is to create an art historical mode capable of encountering an artwork as a material-force, as a mode of transmissibility wherein art historians could grasp that an event is dated (it takes on a consistency in a specific past) even as it continues to produce effects into the future, effects that alter and change the past. This would be to creatively involve ourselves with an ontology of the work of art as a temporal passage. It would be an art history truly capable of thinking thresholds and passages, becoming and history-a diagrammatic art history wherein art history becomes a theory-practice of multiplicities, a practice more aligned with Spinozist joy than historicist melancholy.2Moxey articulates the motivating problematic he desired to confront in his book here: 'The aesthetic power of works of art, the fascination of images and their capacity to shape our response in the present, argues against treating them as if they were simply documents of particular historical horizons' (137). Of course, Moxey is correct to identify this fundamental art historical paradox as a problematic. …